DASHEEN Part Deux: THE SABOTAGING OF 21ST CENTURY NEGMARRON

BUILDING THE 21ST AGRICULTURAL CYBER-WARRIOR

also called

FUCK PAT JOSEPH AND FRIENDS

Part of a developing work on

THE INFORMATION WAR OF THE 21^ST CENTURY NEGMARRON

Special note: This article has nothing to do with Pat Joseph. The fact that he was instrumental in causing farmers to hurt themselves instead of improve themselves is purely coincidentally. The title of this article is entirely exploitative and gratuitous. We want to thank Pat Joseph for being the kind of person that we can abuse in this manner with no significant consequences. And, of course,  you, for being the kind of person who reads the fine print.

I’m trying to build an information warrior.

I’m trying to build a 21^st century Neg. The model I have (the Jason Sifflet V9.2) doesn’t grow enough food. The other models I’ve seen mostly suffer the same failures. Or worse. Some of the ones with the best operating systems and the biggest memories have a fatal flaw that Neg scientists call C3, The Cowardice-Corruption Code.

(The rest of us don’t recognize the condition – we just write these people off a Neg Crapaud.)

It’s like a virus that prevents the best, newest computers from using their communications capabilities and/or the firewalls that maintain the computer’s integrity.

The Neg models that do grow enough food generally need a lot of updating. They’re working on operating systems that pre-date the invention of the personal computer.

Fuck.

One way or the other, I’m going to need more people to finish the project. I was hoping I could do this alone. I don’t trust people. Even 20^th century Neg. Maybe, especially….

I know them too well.

They are the stuff that losing is made of. With maybe a dozen or so exceptions, they are the definition AND the classic case study of what we should NEVER do again. Twentieth century Neg (with few exceptions) are a cautionary tale to all future generations. And the moral of the story is “No matter how bright you are, you’re nothing if you’re not a gardener.”

WE MIGHT BE LOSERS, BUT WE CAN’T BE DEFEATED

Okay, soldiers, before you think I’m getting all Rick Wayne (i.e. demotivational) on you, let me say this:

You might not be winners, yet.  But you have never been losers.

We never surrendered in the Dasheen Wars of the 1790s. We lost, yes. But admitted defeat? Never. When we walked out of Morne Fortune with our flags raised and our drums rolling, we surrendered the last fort. We didn’t surrender the struggle.

Negmarron never surrenders.  We may lose and concede. We die and we give them hell while we do it. But never surrender. History supports that.

Even nursery rhymes support that:

“When they were only halfway up, they were neither up nor down…”

The Grand Old Duke of York is a nursery rhyme that lampoons Sir Ralph Abercrombie, a pompous military genius who thought he was better than any African and would make cod cakes of us. Instead, we dragged him through a personal hell, ridiculing him as he advanced up Morne Fortune and we, in our hopeless cause, drove him back for nothing but pride and entertainment purposes.

We did this after it was clear that his resources would eventually exhaust us. We knew we were lost, but we kicked ass anyway. It was like Walsh and Big Bird batting reckless sixes and fours at the bottom end of the order when the West Indies was 200 runs behind and all the real batsmen were out for duck.

Heroic, senseless, entertaining stuff. Without reading The Art of War, they knew that in death ground, YOU MUST FIGHT. And they did it, while starving and throwing words at British soldiers if they ran out of ammunition.

And you know Negmarron. We might run out of anything else. But we will never run out of pawol jettay.

The epic generation of Negmarron made fucking Abercrombie beg for his victory. They made that bitch respect them. Treat them with the honors of war, like they were French royalists or Prussian officers or something. They made him kiss their high black asses in exchange for his ‘victory.’

When they were done, he knew that they were always his equals. With better arms and training, they might have been his betters. Which is not to say his undoing. Or his ignominious death at the hand of some subtly savage Marronesse.

Historically, that is who we are: A people who didn’t give up in the face of certain defeat. A people who demanded honor in the face of death.

Furthermore: We never surrendered our freedom struggle.

We never agreed to be on the shit end of any economic stick. We never had a chance to prove that because within a generation of the end of the Dasheen Wars, British people were, inevitably, coming to their right fucking minds. Their abolitionists infiltrated their governments, Adam Smith wrote his love letter to greed and profit (Wealth of Nations) and the slavery part of the African Holocaust came tumbling down.

Negmarron were so good at freedom that by the 1880s (i.e. before and during the Scramble for Africa) the colonial masters had to pass discriminatory new laws to reign in Negmarron economic, political and intellectual growth from the North America to South America. By the turn of the century, many of our gains were lost. We were eating shit again.

That post-Emancipation legislation was the true sperm of the racism we fought in the 20^th century. (What the Dasheen Neg faced in the 1790s was a whole nuther thing. Nineteenth and 20^th century Neg were subjects, serf and vassals. Eighteenth century Neg were considered property or dead. Lucky for us, they preferred to live free or die.)

Even after getting us to agree to end hostilities, after agreeing that slavery was inhuman and un-Christian,  they didn’t stop being at war with us.

From a legalistic point of view, we didn’t stop being at war with them either. We have been in a continuous state of war, manifesting in different states (anti-war, conflict, confrontation, demonstration, whatever) for the last 225 years or more.

Be clear.

I’m not trying to incite anything. After all…

Twenty-first century Neg can do more damage with three laptops and free wifi than trade unionists and slave revolt leaders could do with thousands of rioting firebrands.

But, wifi warriors, we have NEVER stopped fighting battle after battle for our survival. We have NEVER stopped being at war for liberty.

This is both the historical and the present fact.

And we are infinitely more powerful now, not just because of technology, but because in these times, the Neg know that everyone who fights to survive is dead.

Negmarron have to fight to advance. Every single day. Holding your ground is a fail. Negmarron have to take new ground in some way, every single day.

Which means that until we officially call it off, it’s on, motherfuckers. It’s on.

I’m just saying…

THE POLITICAL POWER OF FOOD

In the 20^th century we were told that Food Comes First and that knowledge is power. So we went to school. But somehow, we ended up with an agricultural export economy that imported most of its food. Fail.

How did a decent Negmarron nation like Iguanaland allow such a magnificent fuck up?

And…

How did a right-thinking rebel blog like this even ask such a pointless, demotivating question?

Fuck Pat Joseph and what went wrong.

Let us think on the political muscle of the food we grow ourselves.

Dasheen was one of our first political power sources. The strategic planting of dasheen all over the island by Negmarron warriors (including flocks, prides and hordes of Marronesse) made us faster and stronger than an enemy that was more numerous and had guns that, you know,  worked.

The discovery of our secret led, of course, to the ultimate surrender of Morne Fortune, signifying the return of Nazism…I mean, British rule and slavery.

In the 100 years that followed, limes were outlawed, goats, yams, other fruits and vegetables, all to deprive the Neg, not of food, but of political power. The Neg had to work in a job, buy in a shop and live in the shame of sobriety or the ignominious bliss of full blown alcoholism.

According to them.

But Negmarron more hardcore than that. East Indian indentured servants gave us breadfruit, mangoes and all kinds of new fruits and vegetables. Or we stole it from them. Either way…we got them. Win.

We still maintained our own indigenous economy. As long as food sprouted from the ground, we didn’t need them or anything they had.

Until, of course, electricity and running water made us want to be more like the enemy than the enemy himself.

It was an opening against us. Science and propaganda were unleashed against our crops as we read law, engineering and literature in electric light instead of kerosene flame.

Coconut oil was a recipe for getting heart attack, they said. Dasheen has no nutritional value. Same for breadfruit and mango. Blahblahblah, blahblahblahblah…

In the end they hurt themselves more than they hurt us with that. Now, no one believes the evening news anymore. No one believes any scientist in the media unless the system is out to get him. Any scientific report you see on the evening news can clearly be identified as an advertisement in disguise. They killed their own credibility by lying about coconut and dasheen. When our farmers finally become scientists and researchers, it’s going to be a piece of cake becoming the gold standard of truth in the food science industry. And we have sell-out scientists of the 20^th century to thank for that.

Thank you, Science.

They said our stuff was no good and gave their people white flour and corn instead. They inundated us with their lifestyle food for profit products, making succeeding generations both bigger and more feeble than the last.

But every time some Ivy League smart ass comes back from his godless vision quest in the jungles of Bongozillia or whatever, with a great idea to make millions, the science suddenly changes to suit his marketing needs.

So this year, we find that Gwyneth Paltrow is using coconut oil as mouthwash because it prevents the very same heart attack that scientists told us it caused.

I…I…I don’t know what to say….

How do say ‘sigh’ and ‘wow’ at the same time?

Sow!

Why?

Demotivational thoughts coming back again. Let’s focus.

Given the patterns of collusion between Western science and the profiteers and given our own historical attestation of the political power of food, I assert that St Lucia could have a billion dollar agriculture industry in a decade.

The only reason why we don’t is because someone is deliberately fucking it up. Lucky for us, whatever they are getting paid, our success in agriculture is worth more to both us and them.

We just haven’t been paying attention.

WHO BETRAYED THE NEGMARRON FARMER?

We must come to terms with the truth of who fucked Negmarron agriculture in the last two and a half decades.

We like to think that Chiquita fucked us.

And they did.

But we were bent over and greased up. What did we expect them to do?

The most primal basic truth is that we fucked ourselves when we elected leaders who didn’t understand that while we need a smaller fraction of people to work in food production, the volumes MUST INCREASE.

Any decrease in agricultural volumes must be regarded as a crisis. A failure. There is no profitable economic scenario in which food production goes down. Not in communism, not in capitalism, not on Newt Gringich’s Moon colony, nowhere!

Negmarron agriculture – food security at its best – is the unsung foundation stone of this multi-island nation that stretches from Haiti to the interior of South America.

And in the five island of Guadeloupe, Dominica, Laba,  Luci and Vinci this is more critical than anywhere else that slaves ran away and formed their own nations en bas bois.

Bim maybe Neg York. Haiti may be Neg-xas or Neg-ambama. St Kitts is definitely Neg D.C and Jamaica is Neg-ifornia. But we in Guadi, Domi, Laba, Luci and Vinci are motherfucking Neg-ginia.

Langley.

Quantico.

You know what I’m saying. And if you don’t, I don’t think anyone should explain it to you.

We of the middle eastern Caribbean (omg, that sounds horrible) are a critical part of the history and power of our nation. We need to step the fuck up.

And before we even deal with the revolutions in education, health care, the domestic economy, foreign investment and financial services, WE MUST COMMAND OUR FOOD SECURITY.

Anyone who tries to distract you from this is YOUR ENEMY.

LAND x LABOUR to the SQUARE OF INTELLIGENCE x APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY= DIRTY NEG FARMER MONEY, BITCHES!!!

The laissez faire export culture of the 20^th century banana industry paid us off to fuck us good. It reinforced illiteracy among farmers. The farmers themselves played along by sending their kids to school to free them from the land.

Big mistake.

We needed to send the cubs to school to make the farmers more futuristic. If we did, we’d have 15-30,000 scientists with business acumen who regard market forces as surfers regard waves, because they only thing they have to fear is an ACT OF GOD, like flooding or hurricane.

Instead we have a bunch of civil servants, gangsters, lawyers, real estate agents and transport drivers who will never amount to a footnote in human history, because frankly, they make no worthwhile contribution to humanity.

Except the transport drivers. Some of them.

The rest are professional, highly paid, unethical liabilities. If they were stocks, you would dump them so they don’t contaminate your portfolio. But they are 20^th century Neg Crapaud. So they get promoted, the same way the worst assholes in African and South American hellholes do.

I’m not saying these are smart bad guys while farmers iz ignorant asses.

Quite the opposite. While ignorance and apathy are rewarded institutionally to this day, many farmers are and always have been scientist-businessmen who succeed no matter what Sandals, Chiquita, the WTO, the US Trade Representative, Pat Joseph, Kenny Chastanet and Leo Clarke do. (Leo has nothing do with it. But he deserves every slap he gets.)

You know why?

Because they grow food. People must eat. It’s the most unassailable business model ever apart from, maybe, undertaking. The only one to work consistently from the invention of irrigation right through to the takeover of the internet.

Farmers are using several sciences at a time to grow the best weed in the small islands have ever seen. To get better weed you have to be in Jamaica on a Blue Mountain on the same day the American goods are separated from the local stuff.

And hear that: ALL GANJA FARMERS GROW FOOD.

I don’t know why. That’s just the way it is.

Unfortunately, these farmers are still considered criminals, not researchers in applied sciences and contributors to food security.

Some things never change.

I take that back. Some things HAVE TO CHANGE. As good Negmarron, we have to attack the enemy that fights us down. Well, I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I do.

As for those who try to keep us asleep in the “Agriculture is dying, bananas are over” nightmare-myth, fuck them.

Whatever they got for discouraging and sabotaging our farmers, food security is worth more than that. If they want to continue their secret sabotage of agriculture, then I say we should give them a helluva more work to do. Until the lands are freed up for farmers, rebel agriculturists must continue to do what it is right for the land and for the people.

They must continue to grow an increasing amount of food in and around the plantations of export crops like bananas, ganja and cocoa.

If successive governments do not get off their asses to help us, then, we will know where they stand.

And knowing is half the battle.

THE DEAD AGRICULTURE REVIEW: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ALL THE MISTAKES WE EVER MADE

So, here we are, trying to wake up from the myth that farming is a thing of the past. Our leaders have fallen short on this issue so consistently that we can only reasonably conclude that they are retarded…

Or they are doing it on purpose.

By failing on food security, they benefit our competitors, our rivals and our straight up enemies. By failing on food security, they deprive us of our primary power. Like exposing Superman to kryptonite.

But we know that food comes first. Our history attests to the military and strategic importance of food production in maintaining our little freedom.

So what shall we do?

I have this idea to revive the Annual Customs of Dahomey. Lol. The annual head business. Except, this time, instead of excess captives, we use failed leaders. Heads must roll. How else’re they going to learn?

But before we traipse off to battle woulaying lapo and sonnaying conch shell, let us take some small precaution against all the mistakes we made in the past.

Like in the 1790s. And the 1830s. The 1860/70s. The 1920/30s. And of course, the mother of all liberation struggle mistakes, the 70s and the 80s.

Ah, Bishop…they won everything when they got you. The Cold War, Black Power, everything was over in the moment you fell in that ditch. I was 10. I had watched enough TV to like Reagan. But I could feel it when Bishop died. Something bad had happened. The Neg had been betrayed by EVERYONE in that moment.

Served us right for following ANYONE.

1794: We fucked up when we took over St Lucia from the British in 1793 but failed to restore agriculture by 1794. We fucked up when we failed to use our women in economic development and political leadership as effectively as they had been used in war. We must NEVER AGAIN neglect the vital political, economic and military importance of food and the MARRONESSE. If there are two things we can’t live without, it’s food security and family.

1830s: A generation later, we messed up when we kept the campaigns for better treatment limited to legal battles and whispers with sporadic riots. Because either you’re breaking the fucking law or you’re causing them to break the fucking law. But we were neither hot nor cold. And so, when Emancipation came in 1834, the slavers cried to their mommies for four more years of human rights abuse, so that they could adjust to the new reality of freedom for all. And they got it! It must always be consider a shame and a failure on the part of the Negmarron that between 1834 and 1838 we waited patiently for freedom instead of burning the whole fucking world down. No wonder people don’t respect us, to this day. Four continuous years of fail.

POST-EMANCIPATION: No disrespect meant to the ancestors. I talk tough but I don’t actually know what cat o’nines feel like on my flesh. I have to admire those same coward Negs of the Emancipation generation. Within 20 years of Emancipation, the black middle class was so out of control that discriminatory laws had to be passed to keep them in economic check. These laws were the codification, the real birth of 20^th century racism. And we messed up when we did not accompany our civilized and intelligent debate of these matters with a great deal of sophisticated, articulate property damage. Then, when white hate consolidated itself into the Klu Klux Klan, (later becoming the Southern Democrats, who are today known as the Tea Party) we failed to use the white girls who liked us to infiltrate that shit and destroy it from the inside out. We preferred to be scared. To be lynched. To abandon our farms and run for the cities.  Once again, they deprived us of our means of production. And this time, we helped them do it. Epic fucking fail.

1920s: We failed when, instead of reinventing unionism in the image of our new and unique tribe, we became pawns in the worldwide communist takeover of the workers movement. The smartest young Neg found themselves identifying as communists. As Leninists. As Stalinists. All kinds of stupid shit. With hindsight, we can all admit that unions are a necessary response to the fact that the best millionaires ever (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan) had proved unequivocally they would never give a flying fuck about workers. Worker associations are a necessary defense against the never ending threat of slavery. But, dread: Communists were never cool. Ever.

Well.

Except that one guy on the T-shirts. But that’s different.  He was good-looking. He embodied something about our spirit and principles. His picture tells us something about ourselves. His ideology? Nobody gives a shit. It’s not his communism that’s cool. It’s his freedom thing.

Communism went to great efforts to make itself the opposite of cool. Censorship. Purges. Rations that were actually called Rations. Terrible, terrible fashion, except perhaps for their hats. I mean, who was running the public relations office over there at communism central? And how did good Negmarron not see Stalin for what he was? I look at the great CLR James and I think, “How did you hook up with these assholes?” I mean, think about it. Black communists? Face palm. That was bound to end badly.

You see, it is a fundamental fact of the Negmarron that we have no ideology. Ideology is like a fork or a spade. It’s a tool. You use it. You put it back in its place until you need it again. We are Neg. We are bigger than ideology. Hell, we don’t even have language, religion or codified laws of our own. We’re bigger than all that. The Middle Passage Crossing might have robbed us of our true African identity, but it also freed us from all the bullshit everyone in the world believes.

We are Negmarron. We don’t have to believe in shit.

Except for the fact that nobody’s going to push us around like we are their slaves. Black communists…? I mean, really? That’s the only idea worse than black free market capitalists. Negmarron lost their way because they were too busy fighting something bad instead of being something real. We must NEVER make that mistake again.

THE INDEPENDENCE GENERATION: Remember the West Indies Federation. The ghost of a nation not yet born. Aborted by the vassal prime ministers of Jamaica. It’s premature death was assisted by Trinidad.

Remember the Federation.

Our unborn child. Our murdered mother.

The death of the Federation might be the single biggest fuck up in the political history of Negmarron. We fucked up when we failed to reinvent democracy and economics in our image. We fucked up big time. And we haven’t stopped fucking up since. We failed to take any advice from our Nobel Prize winning economist. We failed to keep the promises of unity. We failed to take the most basic step of independent nation building – national food security. And we put up Customs and Immigration barriers between us where there were none. As though the criminals will be identified by their national ID.

Now, we look at our independent countries, all grown up, and think, “Shit. British colonialism was better than that. And British colonialism sucked!”

90s TO NOW, THE INFORMATION GENERATION: When the world woke up different in the 1990s, we slept. Instead aggressively exploiting change and taking the lead, we waited to see what would happen and what we would get. Up to this day, there are still young people on the island with no internet access, even though they go to wifi schools.

What did we do in the 90s, when we weren’t sleeping?

Oh I remember. We were on no-cut strikes. Basically, we were in the Banana Salvation Committee, plotting new ways not to sell our own fig.

We followed up the self-sabotage of our 1979 revolution with the self-sabotage of the banana industry. Thank you Pat Joseph. May you never die, you fucking spoiler. May your name echo in eternity…with infamy and vainglory. You and Dessalines and that spoilt fucking rich little Ischariot boy.

CAN I HAVE SOME REAL ENEMIES, PLEASE?

So…

Before we go to war, let us honestly answer the question: Who is our real enemy? Who has hurt us the most since the hostilities of the 1790s subsided in Negmarron Nation?

Us.

The answer is us.

If we want to conquer the 21^st century on our terms, the first people we have to conquer is ourselves. That’s rough. Because history has shown that in spite of our disorganization, corrupt leadership, inadequate self-knowledge and foolish squandering of precious resources, we are the shit.

We cannot be easily beaten. Ask Abercrombie. He marched his ass to the top of the hill, but we marched him down again. For 30 days. With nothing. Not even dasheen.

Truly conquering the Negmarron is impossible.

So basically, we are screwed. Except for the fact that we’ve solved this problem before. We solved this problem tens of thousands of times. We just forgot we did.

THE CURE FOR OUR CONTAGIOUS STUPIDITY

(or HOW TO KILL THE NEG CRAPAUD VIRUS THAT MAKES YOU VOTE FOR KENNY CHASTANET)

The 20^th century Neg Crapaud is not just among us. It is within us. Every time I attack some Tourist Board or SLASPA executive or some foreign affairs official doing shate, I try to remember that I am not attacking Louis Lewis or Sean Matthews or Yasmin Walcott.

I am attacking a toxin within me. I am not that different than them. It’s just that I can’t tolerate myself continuing to be that way. So I fucking attack the virus wherever I find it. In me, in them, whatever. No difference. Kill the virus. That’s the mission. End of story.

We MUST kill the fear that infects, corrupts and disables our intelligence. We must conquer the cowardice and complacency that makes us fail to speak the truth to power in boardrooms, in the media and on facebook. We must conquer the fear that prevents us from ratting out our mis-leaders. We must conquer the fake-ness in us that allows the fakeness in them to fester into organized corruption. Conquer our own personal fake-ness.

The virus in us makes us want to be what we see on TV. But we will never truly succeed at being TV people because, it’s too late for us. We’re too real. We were born real. We’ve been real for hundreds of years. We will never successfully be these people we see on TV. Not even they can. There’s a celebrity train wreck somewhere in the world every week. Because that shit ain’t real.

We must conquer our subconscious self-hatred without justifying any of our traditional bad habits. We have to be real. But anything real that we are better be good, otherwise we’re getting rid of it too.

We must conquer our lands so that farmers are free to put them to the use in the interest of Negmarron national security.

How the hell are we going to do that? I have an idea.

Or rather, I stole it.

Whatever. As long as we have it.

HOW TO KILL A NEG CRAPAUD

The affliction that caused valiant, heroic and legendary 18^th century Negmarron to devolve into the complacent and corrupt 20^th century Neg Crapaud is most efficiently treated as an infection.

A foreign thing.

A mortal illness that requires urgent attention, because the sicker you get, the money you make.

Treatment is simple.

You need to repeatedly download tetrabytes of things you don’t presently know into your brain. The fastest way to do this is to read. The most excellent way is to live like God told you heaven was real but you had to build it yourself.

Then, you need to apply those things you read and lived. After you do that, look back at how you applied your knowledge and FLOGG yourself for EVERY SINGLE THING you could have done better. This is absolutely important. You must not be forever guilty for making a mistake, but people forgive themselves too easily. You must remember every mistake and shortcoming well enough that it NEVER happens to you again.

If you don’t learn from your mistake, the mistake is worth nothing. Don’t waste your mistakes.

If you are following instructions correctly, you will have more new questions than you have answers. This is frustrating for many people who expect some kind of orgasm. But in spite of whatever it feels like, having more questions is universally considered DOING IT RIGHT. Having new more interesting problems instead of old recurring ones means you are probably winning.

Once you have new, more interesting questions than you had yesterday….

Repeat the entire process.

Again.

Again.

Again.

One day, you wake up and the damned cyborg works way better than you expected.

And that’s how you make a Negmarron peasant farmer, descended from the ancient St Lucian Samurai, into a 21^st century information warrior.

It’s not easy, but it’s so simple, my 17 month old daughter can do it. (Of course, she is brighter than most people, so that might be a bad example.)

And while we’re attacking the enemy within…

By the restoration of agriculture and aggressive attacks on the culture of corruption alone, we will rescue a nation and its future from a generation of mis-leaders. We don’t even need a big external transformative change to start profiting. Once we fix our individual selves and kill the individual enemy within, we’re on our way to recovering our traditional culture of excellence in all things.

It’s like planting dasheen in your mind, where they can’t kill it. After that…

We just need to fire some people in the government and civil  service. And do everything straight. For once. Goddamit. How hard is that?

We’re not poor. We’re just being foolish and afraid.

Of ourselves.